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In an interview with David Axelrod at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics, U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commented on the ways the wealth-dominated system tries to keep her in her place: (This is at about the 1 hr 5 min point.)
...[T]hey assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.
Presidents come and go. Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go. But single payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers' rights are forever. Women's rights, all of that.
A finer point to your question is that when you aren't attached, right, when you haven't been fantasizing about being this or that since you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating. Because I get to wake up every day and say, how am I going to meet the moment? And conditions change radically all the time. So I make my response less to an attachment to some ... title or position and working backwards from there. But I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and observing the conditions of this country. And saying, what move or decision can I make today that's going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, and better than yesterday?
We are about two months away from the USA's midterm elections. It's a chance to reverse some of the corruption and cruelty of the MAGA occupation. Times are too urgent to let glib categories shape our evaluation of candidates, but it sometimes seems that's all the media can manage.
So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and similar candidates are, we're told, too radical for national success. The recent successes of other progressive primary winners reportedly makes the Democratic Party establishment nervous. But none of that gamesmanship interests me. I want someone to vote for who is passionate about justice and sustainability, and who will work for that vision from whatever vantage point they have, not someone who knows how to pander.
Fortunately, "all politics is local," according to the maxim attributed to Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. Ultimately, everyone running for office must convince their own constituency. Some of those constituencies will be convinced by candidates from the left, others will choose differently. Let those candidates all define themselves by their own words and actions, and their ability to listen to us, not by the categories and conventional wisdom of one or another establishment.
In an article in The Atlantic, "Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism?", author Tyler Austin Harper makes his point right up front in his article's subtitle: "Having money isn’t at odds with wanting a fairer economic system." Naturally, such "rich kids" come in for some predictable and tiresome mocking, but there's actually something interesting going on:
In a 1977 essay for the magazine Radical America, Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined a term for America’s growing population of college-educated knowledge workers: the “professional managerial class.” The authors noted that members of the PMC tend to have jobs that create and maintain capitalist culture and its associated values. They have jobs in industries—such as the arts, education, medicine, entertainment, law, advertising, and technology—that could be seen as offering proof of capitalism’s ability to provide Americans with lives that are culturally rich, physically healthy, intellectually stimulating, and filled with technologies that make things easier. (Being a staff writer at The Atlantic is a great example of one such job.)
According to the Ehrenreichs, the 20th-century professional class played a crucial role, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, in maintaining the public’s faith in the economic system. The present growing embrace of leftist politics among the professional class suggests that the PMC is no longer especially enthusiastic about that mission. A CBS News/YouGov poll released this month found that Democrats, who belong to a party dominated by the professional class, were almost twice as likely to view socialism favorably (58 percent) as they were to view capitalism favorably (32 percent). Among college-educated Democrats, support for socialism was 71 percent.
Could there be some deeper reason for this development other than blatant hypocrisy in the pursuit of edgy trendiness? [Links are in the original article.] Harper continues,
A teacher who has to buy his own school supplies, an adjunct professor who works at three universities to make ends meet, a social worker who assists the disadvantaged, a nurse whose hospital was bought by private equity, a federal employee who watches lobbying groups kneecap safety regulations, a data engineer who helps make a product that gives teens suicide advice, a student who takes out burdensome loans to get a degree that is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a middle-class life—what should these people think of capitalism as it currently exists? What do you expect them to think? And why is it considered hypocrisy, rather than a defensible moral position, when some members of the PMC decide that the ugliness they encounter in their workplace, corporate office, and daily life is symptomatic of a system that deserves significant, even systemic, reform?
Still visiting The Atlantic ... Jonathan Chait considers "The Apocalyptic Style in Woke Thinking: much of the climate movement, particularly its most radical elements, has pivoted to Palestine."
Apparently if we care intensely enough about climate change (he cites the example of Greta Thunberg), we are not supposed to "pivot" to another major concern.
The draining of energy away from issues that once seemed so urgent has been slightly disorienting, even humorous. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently repeated a catchphrase that has circulated on the left, “Woke 1 was crazy,” which simultaneously laughs off the excesses of the social-justice left while implicitly assuming that a Woke 2 is just around the corner. The reality, however, is that Woke 2 is already here, and Gaza is its current preoccupation.
It's very fair to point to the excesses of the "apocalyptic style" in advocacy, whether it's in climate change or the campaign for a truly fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's also very important to ask whether the zeal for either cause, or any cause of equal gravity, is driven by powerful ideals or some form of self-gratification. Are you genuinely trying to open the eyes of the greater public, or is your favorite audience already in the activist subculture whose good opinion you crave?
But it is totally unfair to mock genuine idealists when they may suddenly realize that, in the midst of their care for an ecologically sustainable future for our children and grandchildren, they also become aware that Palestinians are being killed by the tens of thousands, and others may become ethnically cleansed from their homes. If you or I become aware of mass human agony today, don't we have the right to switch priorities for a time? We may earn criticism for not having all the facts, or for ineffective advocacy, but good-faith efforts to respond to catastrophe don't deserve the dismissive label of "woke."
Once again, the socialists are coming!
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| Prince Harald playing with the Roosevelts' dog Fala. Source. |
Norway lost its beloved "national grandfather," King Harald V, exactly a week ago.
This YouTube video is a fair introduction to his life and influence.
Among his many personal qualities as a hardworking and devoted servant of his country, King Harald was a living link between the generation that grew up during World War II and our own time. When the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, Prince Harald was just three years old. He and his mother and sisters spent most of the war in the Washington, DC, area, including some time in the White House as guests of the president. At age 8, Harald attended Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth inauguration, standing just behind the president.
Rest in peace!
Here are some of the arrangements for Harald's funeral in Oslo on this coming Wednesday.
Two amazing singers! I've cued up a place in the documentary Dolly and Friends: Making a Soundtrack where Dolly Parton gets together with Mavis Staples.
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